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All posts tagged: fat nancy’s new diet

Sketches and collages from ARCHIGRAM are a recurring reference point for Fat Nancy. The magazine dominated the architectural avant garde in the 1960s and early 1970s with its playful, pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future after its formation in 1961 by a group of young London architects – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb. “A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.” So wrote David Greene in a poem published in the first issue of Archigram magazine or, as Greene’s co-editor, Peter Cook, called it “a message, or abstract communication”. It was published in 1961 on a large sheet of the …

Originally by I’m Not a Fiend Aahh, meat. Sometimes I love the stuff. Sometimes I go weeks feeling completely ambivalent about it. Sometimes I read depressing articles and the thought of meat consumption makes me feel sick. Sometimes I eat Iranian food and remember just how beautiful meat really is. How could I ever have thought otherwise?? Those Persians know how to treat meat right. You haven’t experienced tender meat till you’ve had a good Iranian kebab. So I was excited to spot Shamsuddin on Satwa Road recently. It’s pretty bare bones, but that’s just the way I like it. Basic furniture. Tissue boxes. TV on the news channel. Two guys running the whole place. The guy working the grill must have been someone’s son, a baby-faced meat apprentice. Shamsuddin don’t even have a menu. Just decide if you want mutton or chicken, minced or pieces. Simple as that. The rest will come to you. In the face of such choices, we ordered a plate of everything. A housemade laban, heavy on the fresh mint, kept …

Last weekend FNND took a trip down to the farmer’s market on the balcony (next to the car park) of the Emirate’s Towers, she left the house wondering as to the potential of this alternate version set up by Baker and Spice. And what a lovely surprise! There are few things nicer on a weekend that lazily browsing through a market, however small, with an abundance of fresh vegetables, eggs, breads and pastries, delicious coffee straight from Ethiopia’s farms, pure cacao and lucuma (who ever heard of that? it’s a very delicious source of vitamin B) and spiced Yemeni honey. Each vendor had their own story to tell, the founders of the companies were there to tell you about their food, including the owner of Baker and Spice who set up the market. Fat Nancy spent the morning talking food, coffee, herbs and honeys, learning about Ethiopia, farming in the UAE, Yemen and South America. It was great. Coffee Planet with their range of speciality coffees. The Indonesian was FNND’s favourite after a tasting of all …

Hamra Abbas represented by Lawrie Shabibi Hamra Abbas’s work is playful and unpredictable, it has a definite presence, but is so versatile that it is hard to pin down exactly what it is about an Abbas work that tells you it is hers. Fat Nancy takes a look at why she likes it so much. Firstly and overarching, Abbas’s work is pure. In its use of colour, its concepts and humour, she sticks to absolute and direct messaging. The colours she uses are sharp, clear and translucent, even when used in prints. They remind FN of David Batchelor’s works, often managing to bring a similar brightness to the fore without the need for artificial light, using instead natural light, colour on paper, on glass, with food colouring in plasticine, as a tool to manipulate and reflect the intensity she desires. Abbas’s life, and consequently her work, could be said to be somewhat fractured – coming from Pakistan and a deeply Islamic community and now living and working in the USA. Perhaps it is this contradiction that makes it addictively erratic, fickle and playfully …

I will rarely be found at vegan store or a health food emporium. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with beetroot leaf yoghurt or paying $20 for an aubergine. No, it’s because it’s usually frequented by self righteous new age hippies and middle class parents – moaning on about how they weaved their own trousers from fluff they found in a gutter whilst listening to new age music that re-centred their chakras. Fortunately the tracks on Light in the Attic’s ‘I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990′ are tracks you’re not likely to hear playing in your local Whole Foods store. I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990 is the first major anthology to survey the golden age of ‘New Age’ and reveal the unbelievable truth about the genre. I Am The Center, is a reverberation of psychedelic music, and great by any standard. This is analog, handmade music communicating soul and spirit, often done on limited means and without commercial potential, self-published and self-distributed. …